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California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches

197 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

hu3 1y ago
Related news from 8 months ago: "Brazil limits ultra-processed foods in school meals to 15%" https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02/brazil-limits-ultra-processed-foods-school-meals-15 https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02...
frereubu 1y ago
I'll be very interested to see the definition of "ultra-processed" in this legislation. I couldn't find one at a first glance - it seems to mandate that someone defines it, but doesn't contain a definition itself from what I could see. Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264#:~:text=104661.%C2%A0(a)%C2%A0(1)%C2%A0For%20purposes%20of%20this%20article https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals! > In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic. Wow.
- crummy 1y ago
  thanks for the tip. The text is not on that page, but here's a link to it if anyone else is curious: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264#:~:text=104661.%C2%A0(a)%C2%A0(1)%C2%A0For%20purposes%20of%20this%20article https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
  - frereubu 1y ago
    Duh, thanks - forgot I'd found that on the page with the actual bill!
  - camel-cdr 1y ago
    > 104661. (a) (1) For purposes of this article, except as provided in subdivision (b), “ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3). > (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows: > (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions. However right after it's entirely opened up again: > (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following: > (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture. > (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020. > (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph
    - maxerickson 1y ago
      Avocado calories are pretty close to 10% saturated fat, as an example. Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.
      - donatzsky 1y ago
        Look into the keto diet. Fat is definitely not the main issue, sugar and other simple carbs are.
        IAmBroom 1y ago
        Your conclusion presupposes we buy into the "keto diet is healthy" proposition. However, there is a preponderance of real data that fats have been demonized by the sugar industry in the past, and HGI foods (high-carb, generally) are a bigger issue.
      - pragma_x 1y ago
        Yeah, this reads like popular health guidance left over from the 1980's. Back then we though that "fat makes you fat" and shifted to sweeteners to make food taste good. Later, we found out that was all due to the sugar industry. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- littlecranky67 1y ago
  Pretty sure it is NOT the definition of that law, but my own definition is: You make a meal only of basic ingredients. A basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging. I.e. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat and fish does not come with an ingredient list. There are some exceptions like dairy products (butter, yoghurt, cheese) which are okay to use.
  - defraudbah 1y ago
    nestle downvoted you
    - defraudbah 1y ago
      whelp, nestle is on me, you will not believe guyz how many upvotes and downvotes i get on this one
  - eisen_matrix 1y ago
    This is based on Nova definition probably. - Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc) - Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar) - Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables) - Ultra-processed foods (foods requiring industrial processing).
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?
      - danielheath 1y ago
        Flour is processed from grains
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of? Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.
- geokon 1y ago
  When I try to open the link I get "NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack from [...] to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov." :|
- donatj 1y ago
  > Stabilizers and thickeners, as defined in Section 170.3(o)(28) of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations. ... > “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.” So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
  - OJFord 1y ago
    Sub-division b point 1 excludes: > Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture. Which I'd guess includes flour.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      Unlikely. Commodity food made available by the USDA is directly sold or distributed by the USDA [1]. [1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-program https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...
      - OJFord 1y ago
        Oh, ok, that doesn't mean at all what I thought it meant, sorry! (British, I just assumed 'commodity food supplied by agriculture' would be all cereals etc., possibly nationally grown only, but you know, commodities.)
      - Lerc 1y ago
        So is the same item counted as UPF when the USDA supplies it but not otherwise, or does it mean the USDA supplying it grant the category of item non-UFP status. Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > So ... flour? If used as a thickener, perhaps. > Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum? This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.
- contrarian1234 1y ago
  Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not. Spices are okay, but MSG is not. Just a laundrylist of the typical alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. Kind of pathetic, but not unexpected from the state legislature I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria. There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics. Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
    - contrarian1234 1y ago
      I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay. The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents. There are just three lines that actually address nutrition: (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. (ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1. (iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars. Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
      - chithanh 1y ago
- anilakar 1y ago
  $HERE the anti-processed proponents seem to be mostly pro-butter folks. Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats took a lot of effort and these useful idiots are undoing much of that work. YMMV.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats What? Are you talking about trans fats?
    - chithanh 1y ago
      I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk. Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats. Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad. This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.
    - anilakar 1y ago
      No, just plain old cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project
- k2enemy 1y ago
  >> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic. > Wow. Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home. It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
  - bko 1y ago
    How much of this is that children refuse to eat normal whole foods? I've heard stories from teachers that mention that children often would rather go without food than eat anything remotely healthy (e.g. apples from cafeteria). My own personal experience from places that are considered food desert is often seeing rotting fruit not being consumed. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to offer healthy option, but just that those would have a limited impact on obesity, expect for maybe calorie deficit if they choose to forgo breakfast or lunch
    - DerArzt 1y ago
      How much of the refusal to eat anything healthy stems from lack of good options? The example given (an apple) in an American school setting brings to mind my cafeteria serving only Red Delicious (which is one of the worst apples for taste). When the option is some fried food vs a wilted salad with no protein source, it's a wonder that any kid would choose the salad. I would love to see better options that are both healthy and enticing. Until then I doubt that we will see much change when the choice of what to eat in the lunch room is left to the children.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      When I was in highschool (2010ish), our school gave you several options for lunch: You could have a real meal that was cooked even though it probably came from the cheaper end of the Sysco catalog but at least was real food, you could get a sub sandwhich made from real ingredients, you could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you could get a minuscule slice of the absolute lowest quality pizza ever made, literally worse than Dominos in quality and flavor and barely over an inch long in arc measurement. 95% of the student body ate that pizza every single day. This includes the supposedly "smart" kids in honors classes. The real food was good! It was fresh and perfectly palatable and varied enough to be healthy! Instead of eating it, the students literally invented a lie to hype up this disgusting facsimile of "pizza" as good. It was regularly claimed that this pizza came from a local small business that sold pizza. This was flagrantly wrong and obvious to anyone who had eaten that pizza, as they used a sweet sauce that was not used in the school pizza. But what the actual hell do Americans expect? We spent decades disallowing the government from telling your kids anything useful, we opted out of "Only 12 minutes of advertising to children per hour on TV" because "regulation is bad", we built a society that advocates rampant consumerism to your kid from before they even can read. Of course they're going to eat the shitty pizza. It's what consumerism tells people to do. In the US, consumerism is a literal lifestyle brand!
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  > [ultra] processed This whole terminology just brings about brain damaged discourse as seen in this same thread. Just you wait for someone to say "itS jUsT LiKE caLLiNg wAtER dIHydrOgEN mONoXide". I much prefer the following: 1. Food providers basically do all this crap to reduce costs. That's it that's the incentive. For _various_ reasons, a good, local food supply chain has become expensive. If we go debugging the causes of that we will find that the solution is outside the purview of a nutrition department. Let's not do that. 2. Instead, we try to limit menus that tend towards being cheap (like school food in this context) to contain dishes that are cheap by default. Food that's cheap by default, pre-cost-optimisation, is most often simple food. Small number of ingredients, very simple cooking process, minimal frying, etc,. Simple enough that they can just make it right there from start to finish, or somewhere nearby, for low cost, with minimal supply volatility. Using my hollywood-inspired knowledge of the american school menu, but practical experience with handling food at schools in India, I'd suggest s/cereal/oats+fruits, s/mac-n-cheese/simpler pasta dish-say pesto or shredded chicken pasta, s/choco milk/just milk, s/chicken nuggets/pulled chicken sandwich with simple veggies. Can add some stew/soup in there as well. Beans too if needed. All with simple spice combinations. These can be easily made fresh on-site or at a satellite kitchen serving 10-15 schools. Beyond 30-40 is when even this gets dicey. Eggs I suppose schools won't be (probably aren't right now) allowed to break it and cook it on-site due to salmonella risk, which is why they all use pasteurised pre-made crap. So I've omitted it. It's also weird for lunch, I assume. I've left out cheese too due to the tendency for folks to shift to imitation cheese, as it's most common cheese even in usual grocery shops. Oil is also minimal - you basically are only using a drizzle of it for trapping flavour above. No frying is done. Bread is pretty much the only processed product left there, you can probably mandate whole wheat % for those, but still, overall it will be a big improvement. Instead of playing a cat and mouse game where you make regulations, and you get back the same effect just through a route skirting those regulations, a practical solution similar to the one above, which removes the incentives to skirt, might be in order. That said, I don't think school food has much to do with child obesity crises. What they eat outside school far outweighs school food in quantity. It's an easy political win though since it's the only part of kids diet that govt controls, which is why they harp on about it.
michaelsshaw 1y ago
If you've never worked in food before, you may be unaware that borderline half of the foods you eat, in restaurants, hospitals, prisons, even schools, are just the same frozen foods from Sysco. Their products are sold nationally and are lower quality than the frozen foods you get at the grocery stores, sold at ridiculous markups at restaurants. Sysco UPFs are at best "mid" and usually worse. They also involve a lot of worker exploitation in Mexico and the far-east. A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows: "Wait, it's all just Sysco?" "Always has been"
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  Video about Sysco https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc
- OJFord 1y ago
  'restaurants'
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Related discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522868
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  You forgot "in America".
- impish9208 1y ago
  Add Sodexo and Aramark and you’ve got close to the entirety of food caterers and suppliers to schools, universities, prisons, etc.
  - michaelsshaw 1y ago
    I've never heard of sodexo, but note that when aramark isn't operating restaurants themselves, they're mainly the towel guys.
kome 1y ago
Americans need to get their act together, about food, but not only. 40.3% of American adults are obese (not overweight), against the 17% in the EU. Sport won't fix that, food will.
- hellotheretoday 1y ago
  Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especially when you combine this with a carbohydrate/sugar rich diet. The EU has a worsening diet. Japan eats more carbs than America. What’s the difference? They naturally walk much more as part of their daily routine because their governments invest in communities rather than stealing tax money to launder to military contractors. Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Japan eats a lot healthier too. Carbs as a number is not everything.
    - chneu 1y ago
      Something like 7% of Americans eat enough fiber on a daily basis. Also something like 45% of calories consumed in the US are ultra-processed now. That tells a huge story.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    Big difference in carbs like sugar and say bread, though. Certainly not an expert on Japanese diet, but I don't think they consume a lot of sugar. Their deserts are famously rather savoury. (And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)
comrade1234 1y ago
What's ultra-processed vs processed? If I make my own sausage by grinding the meat by hand, mixing it with salt and spices, then filling natural casings, I would consider that processed food. What makes it ultra-processed? When Hormel does it instead?
- eisen_matrix 1y ago
  Check out Nova classification. In general - UPF is food that requires industrial processing and high amount of additives.
- ahoka 1y ago
  If you add nitrite to make a salami instead.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > If you add nitrite to make a salami instead This would be a Nova Group 3 food. Processed. But not ultra-processed.
- kome 1y ago
  That's an annoying question. When you add industrial chemicals, yes, it's ultra processed. If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food. But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.
  - donatj 1y ago
    So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering. Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish. The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious. Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact. High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation. 1. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157
PickledJesus 1y ago
I'd recommend this podcast to anyone interested on what ultra-processed foods actually are (and in general): https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-6-ultra-processed-foods https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-6-ultra-pr... Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.
- heisenbit 1y ago
  The key innovation that the UPF category is bringing to the fight is that it is hard to innovate and lawyer around it with complexity.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    Seems to be because the definition is arbitrarily shaped to fit the agendas of whoever is writing the definition. UPFs seem like the screen time of the 2020s -- an overly vague and mostly useless definition borne out of hysteria around a real issue in how people eat. Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.
matt3210 1y ago
Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods Kids don’t pay for school lunch in California.
  - michaelsshaw 1y ago
    No kids pay for school lunch in California.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > kids pay for school lunch in California Not for a few years now [1]. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Yes, because (ultra) processed food tends to be much more cheaper than un- or minimally altered food. Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort. Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes. From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?
submeta 1y ago
I can imagine that some „food“ corps going berserk now. And setting up campaigns worth millions against these moves. I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.
skywhopper 1y ago
This brings back fond memories of growing up in the 80s eating school cafeteria concoctions like “flying saucers” which were a slice of bologna topped with a perfectly round scoop of instant mashed potatoes, into which was stuck a bright yellow-orange stick of ‘cheese’. Yum!
schrectacular 1y ago
I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, especially in a government position, is seen as making you a chump in our culture today.
- krapp 1y ago
  Instead of blaming the low nutritional value of school lunches on line workers being unwilling to "work hard" because of "modern culture," consider the possibility that they aren't the ones responsible for setting the menus or budgeting the ingredients. Your actual gripe is with local governments, the USDA and voters who consider funding any social program to be communism.
  - schrectacular 1y ago
    I think you are letting your biases influence your reading comprehension. I don't blame the line workers. It's not their fault. My gripe IS with the local government. Those are the the ones who have the responsibility to change the system and who seem happy to just buy Sysco. They are government workers too...
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  I work at Google. We have cafeterias with real food. There are videos on youtube fawning over how cafeteria staff are able to tackle this logistical challenge of serving high quality food to so many people each day. "Wow you have such amazing food there" is a selling point. People take their friends to have a meal at work to show off. This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria. Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients. Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.
KempyKolibri 1y ago
There’s an excellent discussion of the most recent RCT on UPF foods with its author here (https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/ https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/). Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time. Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines. Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”? This is a misstep IMO.
- baq 1y ago
  and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'. if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
  - KempyKolibri 1y ago
    > and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'. I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making. > if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) . Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    Being thin is cultural. If your society shames you for being fat you are less likely to be fat. Has nothing to do with ultra processed food
- chneu 1y ago
  Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly. A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain. The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)00360-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)... I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place
giantg2 1y ago
A lot of these limits seem to be set so high that they won't have much impact. But at the same time, the calories limit per item and saturated fat limit are low enough that you potentially cant serve a baked chicken thigh.
silexia 1y ago
I am glad to see they have banned the sale of sugary sodas in schools. This should extend to any food or drink with sugar added.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
Nice to see a good step in the right direction. Our school offers free lunch to all, but we pack our kids' lunches, with almost entirely minimally processed foods (fresh veggies, fruits, fresh bread [not Bimbo garbage], cheese [not sliced Kraft, also garbage], natural peanut butter and fruit preserves (not jam/jelly, also garbage), eggs, bean burritos (which we make ourselves), etc. But it's discouraging how expensive and time consuming it is in today's world just to try to keep our kids healthy. We're not wealthy by any means, but this is what we prioritize in our spending. We could probably cut our monthly food bill in half by buying garbage food from Walmart (but then we'd end up paying more in health care costs).
Cameri 1y ago
Probably they will just find a new name for ultra-processed foods and continue their business as usual. We've been here before countless times.
more_corn 1y ago
Bread qualifies as an ultra processed food.

197 points by Kaibeezy 1y ago

hu3 1y ago

Related news from 8 months ago: "Brazil limits ultra-processed foods in school meals to 15%" https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02/brazil-limits-ultra-processed-foods-school-meals-15 https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02...

frereubu 1y ago

I'll be very interested to see the definition of "ultra-processed" in this legislation. I couldn't find one at a first glance - it seems to mandate that someone defines it, but doesn't contain a definition itself from what I could see. Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264#:~:text=104661.%C2%A0(a)%C2%A0(1)%C2%A0For%20purposes%20of%20this%20article https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals! > In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic. Wow.

crummy 1y ago
thanks for the tip. The text is not on that page, but here's a link to it if anyone else is curious: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264#:~:text=104661.%C2%A0(a)%C2%A0(1)%C2%A0For%20purposes%20of%20this%20article https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
- frereubu 1y ago
  Duh, thanks - forgot I'd found that on the page with the actual bill!
- camel-cdr 1y ago
  > 104661. (a) (1) For purposes of this article, except as provided in subdivision (b), “ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3). > (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows: > (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions. However right after it's entirely opened up again: > (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following: > (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture. > (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020. > (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph
  - maxerickson 1y ago
    Avocado calories are pretty close to 10% saturated fat, as an example. Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.
    - donatzsky 1y ago
      Look into the keto diet. Fat is definitely not the main issue, sugar and other simple carbs are.
      - IAmBroom 1y ago
        Your conclusion presupposes we buy into the "keto diet is healthy" proposition. However, there is a preponderance of real data that fats have been demonized by the sugar industry in the past, and HGI foods (high-carb, generally) are a bigger issue.
    - pragma_x 1y ago
      Yeah, this reads like popular health guidance left over from the 1980's. Back then we though that "fat makes you fat" and shifted to sweeteners to make food taste good. Later, we found out that was all due to the sugar industry. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
littlecranky67 1y ago
Pretty sure it is NOT the definition of that law, but my own definition is: You make a meal only of basic ingredients. A basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging. I.e. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat and fish does not come with an ingredient list. There are some exceptions like dairy products (butter, yoghurt, cheese) which are okay to use.
- defraudbah 1y ago
  nestle downvoted you
  - defraudbah 1y ago
    whelp, nestle is on me, you will not believe guyz how many upvotes and downvotes i get on this one
- eisen_matrix 1y ago
  This is based on Nova definition probably. - Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc) - Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar) - Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables) - Ultra-processed foods (foods requiring industrial processing).
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?
    - danielheath 1y ago
      Flour is processed from grains
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of? Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.
geokon 1y ago
When I try to open the link I get "NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack from [...] to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov." :|
donatj 1y ago
> Stabilizers and thickeners, as defined in Section 170.3(o)(28) of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations. ... > “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.” So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
- OJFord 1y ago
  Sub-division b point 1 excludes: > Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture. Which I'd guess includes flour.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    Unlikely. Commodity food made available by the USDA is directly sold or distributed by the USDA [1]. [1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-program https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...
    - OJFord 1y ago
      Oh, ok, that doesn't mean at all what I thought it meant, sorry! (British, I just assumed 'commodity food supplied by agriculture' would be all cereals etc., possibly nationally grown only, but you know, commodities.)
    - Lerc 1y ago
      So is the same item counted as UPF when the USDA supplies it but not otherwise, or does it mean the USDA supplying it grant the category of item non-UFP status. Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > So ... flour? If used as a thickener, perhaps. > Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum? This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.
contrarian1234 1y ago
Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not. Spices are okay, but MSG is not. Just a laundrylist of the typical alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. Kind of pathetic, but not unexpected from the state legislature I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol
- londons_explore 1y ago
  I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria. There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics. Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
  - contrarian1234 1y ago
    I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay. The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents. There are just three lines that actually address nutrition: (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. (ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1. (iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars. Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
    - chithanh 1y ago
anilakar 1y ago
$HERE the anti-processed proponents seem to be mostly pro-butter folks. Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats took a lot of effort and these useful idiots are undoing much of that work. YMMV.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats What? Are you talking about trans fats?
  - chithanh 1y ago
    I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk. Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats. Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad. This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.
  - anilakar 1y ago
    No, just plain old cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project
k2enemy 1y ago
>> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic. > Wow. Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home. It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
- bko 1y ago
  How much of this is that children refuse to eat normal whole foods? I've heard stories from teachers that mention that children often would rather go without food than eat anything remotely healthy (e.g. apples from cafeteria). My own personal experience from places that are considered food desert is often seeing rotting fruit not being consumed. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to offer healthy option, but just that those would have a limited impact on obesity, expect for maybe calorie deficit if they choose to forgo breakfast or lunch
  - DerArzt 1y ago
    How much of the refusal to eat anything healthy stems from lack of good options? The example given (an apple) in an American school setting brings to mind my cafeteria serving only Red Delicious (which is one of the worst apples for taste). When the option is some fried food vs a wilted salad with no protein source, it's a wonder that any kid would choose the salad. I would love to see better options that are both healthy and enticing. Until then I doubt that we will see much change when the choice of what to eat in the lunch room is left to the children.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    When I was in highschool (2010ish), our school gave you several options for lunch: You could have a real meal that was cooked even though it probably came from the cheaper end of the Sysco catalog but at least was real food, you could get a sub sandwhich made from real ingredients, you could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you could get a minuscule slice of the absolute lowest quality pizza ever made, literally worse than Dominos in quality and flavor and barely over an inch long in arc measurement. 95% of the student body ate that pizza every single day. This includes the supposedly "smart" kids in honors classes. The real food was good! It was fresh and perfectly palatable and varied enough to be healthy! Instead of eating it, the students literally invented a lie to hype up this disgusting facsimile of "pizza" as good. It was regularly claimed that this pizza came from a local small business that sold pizza. This was flagrantly wrong and obvious to anyone who had eaten that pizza, as they used a sweet sauce that was not used in the school pizza. But what the actual hell do Americans expect? We spent decades disallowing the government from telling your kids anything useful, we opted out of "Only 12 minutes of advertising to children per hour on TV" because "regulation is bad", we built a society that advocates rampant consumerism to your kid from before they even can read. Of course they're going to eat the shitty pizza. It's what consumerism tells people to do. In the US, consumerism is a literal lifestyle brand!
porridgeraisin 1y ago
> [ultra] processed This whole terminology just brings about brain damaged discourse as seen in this same thread. Just you wait for someone to say "itS jUsT LiKE caLLiNg wAtER dIHydrOgEN mONoXide". I much prefer the following: 1. Food providers basically do all this crap to reduce costs. That's it that's the incentive. For _various_ reasons, a good, local food supply chain has become expensive. If we go debugging the causes of that we will find that the solution is outside the purview of a nutrition department. Let's not do that. 2. Instead, we try to limit menus that tend towards being cheap (like school food in this context) to contain dishes that are cheap by default. Food that's cheap by default, pre-cost-optimisation, is most often simple food. Small number of ingredients, very simple cooking process, minimal frying, etc,. Simple enough that they can just make it right there from start to finish, or somewhere nearby, for low cost, with minimal supply volatility. Using my hollywood-inspired knowledge of the american school menu, but practical experience with handling food at schools in India, I'd suggest s/cereal/oats+fruits, s/mac-n-cheese/simpler pasta dish-say pesto or shredded chicken pasta, s/choco milk/just milk, s/chicken nuggets/pulled chicken sandwich with simple veggies. Can add some stew/soup in there as well. Beans too if needed. All with simple spice combinations. These can be easily made fresh on-site or at a satellite kitchen serving 10-15 schools. Beyond 30-40 is when even this gets dicey. Eggs I suppose schools won't be (probably aren't right now) allowed to break it and cook it on-site due to salmonella risk, which is why they all use pasteurised pre-made crap. So I've omitted it. It's also weird for lunch, I assume. I've left out cheese too due to the tendency for folks to shift to imitation cheese, as it's most common cheese even in usual grocery shops. Oil is also minimal - you basically are only using a drizzle of it for trapping flavour above. No frying is done. Bread is pretty much the only processed product left there, you can probably mandate whole wheat % for those, but still, overall it will be a big improvement. Instead of playing a cat and mouse game where you make regulations, and you get back the same effect just through a route skirting those regulations, a practical solution similar to the one above, which removes the incentives to skirt, might be in order. That said, I don't think school food has much to do with child obesity crises. What they eat outside school far outweighs school food in quantity. It's an easy political win though since it's the only part of kids diet that govt controls, which is why they harp on about it.

michaelsshaw 1y ago

If you've never worked in food before, you may be unaware that borderline half of the foods you eat, in restaurants, hospitals, prisons, even schools, are just the same frozen foods from Sysco. Their products are sold nationally and are lower quality than the frozen foods you get at the grocery stores, sold at ridiculous markups at restaurants. Sysco UPFs are at best "mid" and usually worse. They also involve a lot of worker exploitation in Mexico and the far-east. A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows: "Wait, it's all just Sysco?" "Always has been"

Hikikomori 1y ago
Video about Sysco https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc
OJFord 1y ago
'restaurants'
CalRobert 1y ago
Related discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522868
TiredOfLife 1y ago
You forgot "in America".
impish9208 1y ago
Add Sodexo and Aramark and you’ve got close to the entirety of food caterers and suppliers to schools, universities, prisons, etc.
- michaelsshaw 1y ago
  I've never heard of sodexo, but note that when aramark isn't operating restaurants themselves, they're mainly the towel guys.

kome 1y ago

Americans need to get their act together, about food, but not only. 40.3% of American adults are obese (not overweight), against the 17% in the EU. Sport won't fix that, food will.

hellotheretoday 1y ago
Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especially when you combine this with a carbohydrate/sugar rich diet. The EU has a worsening diet. Japan eats more carbs than America. What’s the difference? They naturally walk much more as part of their daily routine because their governments invest in communities rather than stealing tax money to launder to military contractors. Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Japan eats a lot healthier too. Carbs as a number is not everything.
  - chneu 1y ago
    Something like 7% of Americans eat enough fiber on a daily basis. Also something like 45% of calories consumed in the US are ultra-processed now. That tells a huge story.
- OJFord 1y ago
  Big difference in carbs like sugar and say bread, though. Certainly not an expert on Japanese diet, but I don't think they consume a lot of sugar. Their deserts are famously rather savoury. (And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)

comrade1234 1y ago

What's ultra-processed vs processed? If I make my own sausage by grinding the meat by hand, mixing it with salt and spices, then filling natural casings, I would consider that processed food. What makes it ultra-processed? When Hormel does it instead?

eisen_matrix 1y ago
Check out Nova classification. In general - UPF is food that requires industrial processing and high amount of additives.
ahoka 1y ago
If you add nitrite to make a salami instead.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > If you add nitrite to make a salami instead This would be a Nova Group 3 food. Processed. But not ultra-processed.
kome 1y ago
That's an annoying question. When you add industrial chemicals, yes, it's ultra processed. If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food. But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.
- donatj 1y ago
  So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering. Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish. The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious. Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact. High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation. 1. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157

PickledJesus 1y ago

I'd recommend this podcast to anyone interested on what ultra-processed foods actually are (and in general): https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-6-ultra-processed-foods https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-6-ultra-pr... Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.

heisenbit 1y ago
The key innovation that the UPF category is bringing to the fight is that it is hard to innovate and lawyer around it with complexity.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  Seems to be because the definition is arbitrarily shaped to fit the agendas of whoever is writing the definition. UPFs seem like the screen time of the 2020s -- an overly vague and mostly useless definition borne out of hysteria around a real issue in how people eat. Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.

matt3210 1y ago

Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods Kids don’t pay for school lunch in California.
- michaelsshaw 1y ago
  No kids pay for school lunch in California.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > kids pay for school lunch in California Not for a few years now [1]. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp
mschuster91 1y ago
Yes, because (ultra) processed food tends to be much more cheaper than un- or minimally altered food. Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort. Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes. From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?

submeta 1y ago

I can imagine that some „food“ corps going berserk now. And setting up campaigns worth millions against these moves. I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.

skywhopper 1y ago

This brings back fond memories of growing up in the 80s eating school cafeteria concoctions like “flying saucers” which were a slice of bologna topped with a perfectly round scoop of instant mashed potatoes, into which was stuck a bright yellow-orange stick of ‘cheese’. Yum!

schrectacular 1y ago

I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, especially in a government position, is seen as making you a chump in our culture today.

krapp 1y ago
Instead of blaming the low nutritional value of school lunches on line workers being unwilling to "work hard" because of "modern culture," consider the possibility that they aren't the ones responsible for setting the menus or budgeting the ingredients. Your actual gripe is with local governments, the USDA and voters who consider funding any social program to be communism.
- schrectacular 1y ago
  I think you are letting your biases influence your reading comprehension. I don't blame the line workers. It's not their fault. My gripe IS with the local government. Those are the the ones who have the responsibility to change the system and who seem happy to just buy Sysco. They are government workers too...
UncleMeat 1y ago
I work at Google. We have cafeterias with real food. There are videos on youtube fawning over how cafeteria staff are able to tackle this logistical challenge of serving high quality food to so many people each day. "Wow you have such amazing food there" is a selling point. People take their friends to have a meal at work to show off. This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria. Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients. Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.

KempyKolibri 1y ago

There’s an excellent discussion of the most recent RCT on UPF foods with its author here (https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/ https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/). Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time. Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines. Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”? This is a misstep IMO.

baq 1y ago
and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'. if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
- KempyKolibri 1y ago
  > and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'. I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making. > if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) . Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Being thin is cultural. If your society shames you for being fat you are less likely to be fat. Has nothing to do with ultra processed food
chneu 1y ago
Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly. A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain. The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)00360-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)... I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place

giantg2 1y ago

A lot of these limits seem to be set so high that they won't have much impact. But at the same time, the calories limit per item and saturated fat limit are low enough that you potentially cant serve a baked chicken thigh.

silexia 1y ago

I am glad to see they have banned the sale of sugary sodas in schools. This should extend to any food or drink with sugar added.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

Nice to see a good step in the right direction. Our school offers free lunch to all, but we pack our kids' lunches, with almost entirely minimally processed foods (fresh veggies, fruits, fresh bread [not Bimbo garbage], cheese [not sliced Kraft, also garbage], natural peanut butter and fruit preserves (not jam/jelly, also garbage), eggs, bean burritos (which we make ourselves), etc. But it's discouraging how expensive and time consuming it is in today's world just to try to keep our kids healthy. We're not wealthy by any means, but this is what we prioritize in our spending. We could probably cut our monthly food bill in half by buying garbage food from Walmart (but then we'd end up paying more in health care costs).

Cameri 1y ago

Probably they will just find a new name for ultra-processed foods and continue their business as usual. We've been here before countless times.

more_corn 1y ago

Bread qualifies as an ultra processed food.